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The History of FCI

In the Beginning

R. Joseph (“Joe”) Dale founded Formula Consultants Incorporated in 1978. Immediately
prior to that, he was the Chief of Technical Planning and Integration for the County
of Los Angeles Data Processing Department, and so he invited some of his colleagues
to join him in his new venture. Their first contracts were for COBOL application
programming on Sperry mainframes. Soon FCI had acquired the rights to a software
tape management system. Joe and his team built it out, documented it and marketed
it to become the preeminent package of its kind in the 2200 community. For many
customers it became a crucial part of their operating environment.

Concurrently, the growing cadre of FCI developers was also helping other Southern
California clients—such as CalFed—achieve their ambitious goals. FCI became known
as a company of bright, energetic experts who solved technically challenging problems
in the Unisys operating system and application areas—and the company’s reputation
for excellence quickly spread throughout the industry.

The Middle Years

Having established itself as best among a handful of nationally known independent
software providers for Unisys 2200, FCI attracted the attention of Teradata and
StorageTek. Both of these large computer equipment manufacturers wanted to attach
their specialty peripheral devices to the Unisys 2200 and A Series mainframes. Working
as a remote engineering extension to both firms, FCI successfully integrated these
innovative storage products with the Unisys mainframes. FCI’s involvement in product
development, integration, documentation, training, consulting and marketing side-by-side
with these two vendors helped them both achieve business success on a grand scale.

The Teradata project lasted seven years, while FCI’s partnership with StorageTek
continues successfully to this day. During the course of these two projects—both
of which had multiple product deliverables—FCI demonstrated the following key strengths:

Solving highly technical challenges such as modifying the mainframe
operating systems and adapting university code to build the first commercial 2200
TCP/IP stack.

Building internal teams in documentation, quality assurance,
and training to further off-load the client.

Adapting to the client’s engineering practices to achieve the
highest levels of quality.

Going on the road with the client’s marketing and sales teams
to ensure a vigorous business success for the client.

Also during this period in technology advancement, several industry trends emerged:
vendors and platforms converged into heterogeneous, ad-hoc standards; computing
functions migrated toward PC-based, open-systems platforms; and previously-local
computing functions proliferated and thrived on the Internet and World Wide Web.FCI’s projects and consulting have embraced
all three of these trends, helping customers to not only stay current, but anticipate
future industry developments.

The Road Ahead

FCI is not a company that focuses on problems that can be solved by off-the-shelf
packages and “cookie-cutter” development techniques. The FCI
Team thrives on the challenge of providing unique, customer-centered solutions
and the learning process that such an enterprise inevitably entails. FCI Team members
are continually expanding their knowledge base to maintain their position in the
forefront of emerging technology.

If your problem seems insurmountable due to its absolute uniqueness and large-scale
complexity, then . . .